None of this Ever Really Happened (14 page)

"Learn what, though?" asks Nick. "To imitate other writers?
What if you want to be completely original?"

"Well, most people would say that it's impossible to be
completely original, that all work is derived from what came
before it. That's the current word: derivative. Everything is
derivative, nothing is original."

"I refuse to believe that," says Nick.

"Well, of course you do, and you should. You're eighteen
years old. You're inventing the world as you go. Other people
would say you're
re
inventing the world. Later you may agree
with them, or you may not. It's like sex. Every generation
thinks it invents sex and all the words that go with it. It's
difficult
to think of your parents doing those things—"

"Please."

"—or using those words, but they obviously did. Every
generation is pretty sure it invents all the dirty words, but
they are some of the oldest words in any language."

"Okay," says Nick, "what's your story derived from?"

"Mine?"

"The girl who got killed in the car."

"Well, I don't know. I really hadn't thought of it."

"Aha! The principle applies to everyone but you, then."

"No. It applies to me. I just hadn't thought of it. It's not
a conscious thing."

"Don't you think your story's completely original?" asks
Nick.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean mixing fact and fiction like you do, moving the
pieces around, sort of blurring the line between what's true
and what isn't."

"Well, I may think my story's original," I say, "but it probably
is not."

"Isn't that pretty important?" asks the dog-faced boy.

"What?"

"That it's probably not original."

I say, "I think it's more important that I think it is."

"Then you're saying illusion is more important than reality,"
says Nick.

"What I'm saying is that very often illusion is all we
have."

The real importance of the [Quetico-Superior wilderness
canoe country] lies in the values we find
there and that we take with us when we leave, although
we may not quite understand them.

—Sigurd Olson

I
MET TOM MAURY
at the Candlelight for some beers
and asked him about Quetico. "The mosquitoes are
as big as hummingbirds," he said, "the water's as cold
as Dick Cheney's smile, and it's the one thing I've ever done
that wasn't overrated."

Quetico Provincial Park is 1,500 square miles of carefully
regulated, damn-near-pristine wilderness territory in southwestern
Ontario adjoining Minnesota's equally extensive Superior
National Forest. It is an uninhabited tract of water,
woods, and granite in which the only travel allowed is by
canoe. At that, permits must be arranged weeks in advance
to discourage casual or frivolous visitors. No cans or bottles
are allowed in the park and everything else that is packed
in must also be packed out. The name itself may be an old
Chippewa word, or it may be an acronym for the Quebec
Timber Company, which once held leases in the area. Whatever
it once was, it is today one of the least-spoiled, most-assiduously-guarded
preserves on the continent. It is the land
of sky-blue waters.

Our outfitter's base camp was a mile and a half across
Cedar Lake by canoe, I suppose just to give us the flavor of
the thing. We zigzagged there on a warm June evening.

We ate ham and beans in a dining hall that took me back
to the Boy Scout camp of my childhood. Then there was talk
of what to do and what not to do. Hang food bags eight to ten
feet up out on a limb. Don't swim without tennis shoes; a cut
toe can be a serious problem in the wilderness. Don't leave
any fire unattended, even briefly.

Our guide was not a wizened, pipe-smoking Finn as half-anticipated.
Rather, he was a nineteen-year-old named Mike
from Bosnia by way of Romeoville, Illinois. His parents fled
the war at home, and although he was given to braggadocio
and double negatives, I decided to trust him on the assumption
that he knew something of survival.

We took a swim test after dinner, and I plunged right off
the pier, hoping, I suppose, to prove my mettle or some such
thing. The icy water literally took my breath away, and I dogpaddled
twenty yards gasping and choking.

Then we each learned how to hoist the remarkably light
(70 pounds) canoe onto our shoulders. We packed and repacked
our knapsacks, each time designating a few more necessities
as frills to be left behind. And, finally, we crowded
around a picnic table and studied maps by gaslight. There
was much route tracing and wonderful guide-talk about
This Man and That Man Lakes, Poobah Creek, the Wawiag
River, the Bitch and the Bastard, Chatterton Falls, and Have
a Smoke Portage.

Day One, June 6:

I was awakened at 5:00 by the soft gray dawn, mosquitoes
in my ears, and rain on the roof. I lay there for half an hour
thinking about cigarettes. I had been smoking twenty of
them a day on and off for almost twenty years. Now I had
five Merit Ultra Lights that I bummed in a moment of panic
to last me nine full days.

I covered myself with insect repellent and wandered out.
It was drizzling. I interrupted a girl kneeling with a towel
across her bare shoulders at the lakeside, trying to wash her
hair.

I found a seat in the dining hall, read a story by Kathryn
Shonk about feeling far from home in Russia that seemed
eerily prescient, and impulsively smoked all five Merits before
the others arrived for breakfast. Cold turkey.

There were seven of us in the three canoes (I was the only
smoker) with provisions to last nine days. Among us we carried
nine large backpacks, seven life preservers, and seven
paddles. All of these things had to be transported by hand
when we portaged, or traveled overland from one body of
water to another.

Three of the packs contained all of our personal things,
from clothing to flashlights to sleeping bags. One held a
nine-by-twelve–foot canvas tent that, in turn, held all of us.
Five packs contained food and cooking items. They were labeled
breakfast, lunch, supper, staples, and bread. Included
were seven fresh steaks, seven bratwursts, two pounds of
bacon, some smoked sausage, some processed cheese, peanut
butter and jelly and, of course, bread. Then there were the
dehydrated foods ranging from Chicken Tetrazzini and Beef
Flavored (?) Stew to Apple Brown Betty.

The first half of the day we paddled toward Canada, most
of us spending more time in a canoe by noon than we had
in all our lives. We went along quietly for the most part; the
little
adventure we had planned looked somewhat foreboding
from this vantage point. In my head I was humming
the old Eagles tune "Take It Easy"; I always thought the line
about the women ("four that wanna own me, two that wanna
stone me, one says she's a friend of mine") was really a fairly
transparent bit of braggadocio, but for the moment I was
very happy to be in a canoe heading to Canada away from
two women who had been making my life complicated. One
of these I once drove several miles out of my way to call from
a phone booth "standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,"
but that was a long time ago.

At the border there was a picturesque little waterfall,
a tiny customs office, and a ranger station right out of
Yogi
Bear
that was manned by the businesslike but grandparently
Mr. and Mrs. Mike O'Brien. I wondered if there was another
international checkpoint in the world where the only traffic
was canoes. (Waiting for our papers to be processed, I bought
a cigarette from a teenage girl. I felt quite criminal.)

Mike had been complaining all morning about the motorboats
that are allowed on the American side of the border.
"Maniacs," he called their drivers contemptuously as they
hummed by. I imagined that he was trying to impress us with
his Sierra Clubbishness, but after gliding a few miles north,
he had us stop our paddles and listen. We could hear a tiny
brook that looked to be half a mile or more away. We could
hear the voices of two people in a canoe just approaching the
brook. We could nearly distinguish their words.

Our first campsite was just as I had imagined it. There
was a clearing, a small, thick meadow. There was a wood of
birch, cedar, and spruce, the rocky bank of a clear, cold lake,
and even enough sun for a sunset.

We ate our tough little steaks and hash browns from
metal plates as we stood around the fire. Coffee was brewing
over the flames. I felt for my smokes.

Day Two, June 7:

The land of Quetico is primordial. Geologically, it is nearly
infant. The last ice age ended a mere 10,000 years ago. During
it, huge glaciers some two miles thick ground and ground at
the earth until there was nothing left but its skeleton of stone.

Then life began anew. The melting ice supplied the endless
lakes and waterways, but the land lay skinned. Even now,
the soil is so thin that it is often impossible to dig a hole of
more than four or five inches. But remarkably, from this fragile
epidermis has grown one of the world's great forests.

As a kid, what impressed me about Manhattan was not
the size or distinctiveness of its skyscrapers, but the number
of them. So it was in the North Woods. From the middle of
Lake Agnes, I could see thousands, hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions of trees. They were all I could see. They
stretched several miles behind me, several before me, and
half a continent beyond me.

We had our first real portage. It was across a long, steep
trail littered with boulders that ranged in size from bowling
balls to suitcases. It was exhausting and discouraging. How
many of these lay ahead?

But then we crossed placid Lake Agnes to Louisa Falls,
where the waters fell thirty feet into a swirling caldron and
then forty feet more. We stripped, plunged in, washed our
hair in the foam, got very clean, ate cheese and salami sandwiches
on the pine-needle forest floor beside the water and
even the mosquitoes left us alone. (The Quetico skeeter is
legendary and a local joke was that it's the provincial bird.
Portaging with a canoe over your head, you sometimes had
to hold your breath to keep from inhaling the infernal bugs.)

Hale and renewed, we paddled hard up Agnes with the
sun on our backs. We stopped early, camped on a pretty
island
across from hundred-foot bluffs, dried our clothes on
the rocks, fished, climbed the bluffs, sunbathed. Just as the
travelogue said.

By quirk of circumstance, there was not a watch among
the seven of us. In the past two days, I had never known the
exact time. There was some sense of liberation about this,
but it was unsettling, too.

Day Three, June 8:

Physically this was perhaps the worst day of my life. We were
off early under low, fast clouds. A strong wind at our back
moved us quickly, but churned Agnes as well. Where we
crossed her, she was nearly a mile wide and running with
whitecaps. I was frightened, but we made it without mishap.

We then leapfrogged from one back lake to the next, trying
to reach a special rookery and fishing ground. We crossed
seven portages in all, the last especially long and rugged.

By now it was raining. We headed for our last portage,
one of more than a mile, but were driven back even on this
small lake by the wind and slashing rain. Mike said we had
better wait out the rain at the first campsite we had seen in
hours, but the rain came harder and colder and didn't let up.
We crouched pointlessly behind rocks and finally struggled
to put up the tent. Those of us who had dry clothes put them
on, and we all got into our sleeping bags. It was late afternoon,
and the tent swayed and sagged with the water and the
wind. We were all asleep within minutes.

I am a city boy at heart. I like baseball parks and public
transportation. As a rule, I take my nature in small doses
such as postcards and summer cottages. This dose was clearly
too large.

I awoke and it was the same gray light it had been all day.
My dreams had been phantasmagoric and my mind raced. I
distrusted my vision, but there were no straight lines in the
tent against which to test it. I wanted very much to know the
time. I imagined myself at home with one of the two women
I mentioned earlier, entertaining our friends. We were serving
roast chicken, wild rice, and fresh asparagus; there was white
wine on the table and good music in the air. But I wasn't at
home. I was in the opposite place. I was a grown man approaching
middle age who was desperately, painfully homesick.

I wrote this the very next day, but already that night had
all run together in my mind. There was a jolly period, I remembered,
when the rain lightened, and we told dirty jokes
and even sang a song. Then there was more heavy rain, and
we realized that we wouldn't have a hot dinner. The tent began
to leak. The rain dripped, seeped, ran in rivulets, stood
in puddles.

Mike said that food in the tent might attract bears, and
we knew that there would be no dinner. He told us to press
together for warmth. Our soggy bags squished as we did so.
We were seven men in the middle of Canada lying back to
belly like spoons. We dozed, started, twisted, and shivered all
night long.

Several people had spoken the word "hypothermia." I
had come along on this trip because it was free, I was free,
and I thought I might get a story out of it. I had no idea that
it could ever become dangerous.

Day Four, June 9:

Dawn, and it was still raining. Then, shortly afterward, it
stopped. Three of us raised our heads and looked at each
other. We crawled out into the wet gloom.

We huddled to assess our situation. We had not seen any
other people since the previous morning. We had crossed
seldom-used portages to a remote lake in search of walleye.
We faced a mile-long portage through a swamp and an all-day
paddle before there was any chance of meeting other
campers. And, if it rained, they would be able to do little for
us, anyway.

We studied the sky. It looked as if it would rain again any
moment. The least-wet things we had were thoroughly damp.
Everything else was sopping. We had to dry out. We had to
build a fire. We had to eat. We had to try to dry some clothes.

We all whittled away at wet branches until we had created
a small heap of dry tinder. We skinned twigs and raised
a smolder, a flame. It was an hour before the fire was truly
established. It had not begun to rain.

On a graph, the day was an upward parabola from there.
We cooked up eggs with bacon bits and hash brown potatoes.
We built a bonfire after breakfast and rigged up clotheslines
hither and yon, threw sleeping bags across bushes and tree
limbs, dangled wet socks from canoe paddles, roasted tennis
shoes, heated rocks and put them in the tent to dry it out.
And all day long we moved back and forth deeper and deeper
into the woods dragging logs and fallen trees, sawing them,
breaking them, building our woodpile.

Our fire roared. A mist rolled in and left. It did not rain.
That thing that happens to people in common need had happened.
With each dry piece of clothing folded and put away,
our spirits rose. We joked freely now. Someone got together a
softball game with a pair of rolled, wet socks. We made popcorn
and hot chocolate and stood around the fire eating, feeling
our drying pants and socks, telling stories.

After one task or another, I reached for a cigarette. It had
been three days, and I had had little problem. No swollen
extremities, raw nerves, or temper tantrums. But I expected
to smoke. I expected to with coffee, after food, when I wrote.
Because I simply couldn't, I did not miss it terribly. But had
I been able to, there were many times I would have without
hesitation.